1 Introduction

Currently our world is rapidly changing from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. Thus, lifetime education is becoming more and more important because technologies are changing so quickly. Computer-supported education is expected to become a good means for educating a vast number of people all over the world. Time and space will no longer be a barrier for education.

Computer-supported education has existed since the early 1960's, but has never had a real breakthrough. In Chapter 2 I will discuss several approaches to computer-supported education, its advantages, and its drawbacks. I will briefly cover the related area of computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) and how it can enhance computer-supported education. The fusion of traditional computer-assisted instruction (CAI) and CSCW, called online education, is the topic of the last section in this chapter. Its focus lies on communication and collaboration, two very important skills for the 21st Century.

Hypermedia systems and how they can be used for education is the topic of Chapter 3. The history of Hypertext and Hypermedia will show us that these systems have always been related to education, even though the World Wide Web, the most distributed Hypermedia system, lacks features which are important for education. The World Wide Web, and how next generation Web servers like Hyperwave can supplement the Web for education will also be discussed in this chapter. Hyperwave can enrich the Web with features like hierarchical structures, user rights, annotations, synchronous communication, etc.

In Chapter 4 I will present some projects where the Word Wide Web and Hyperwave have been used for educational purposes, from Taiwan, Germany, and New Zealand.

Finally, in Chapter 5, I will discuss the practical work I did for this thesis, which involved developing an applet in the Java programming language. This applet, when embedded in a Web client, enables students to give specific feedback to their teacher during an online lecture. This feedback might, for example, be related to the teacher's pace of lecturing, etc. This can be used either for distance education, where students and teacher are only connected by an Internet connection, or in a modern lecture theatre where students can bring their own computers and attach them to the network. In both cases the lecture material will be presented on a Web page, and the students' computers will automatically be updated when teachers open other Web pages on their computer. At the end of a lecture the list of used Web pages will be inserted into the Web server (Hyperwave server) to enable students to review the lecture whenever they want to.